12.27.10

Summary: Another layer of the onion is peeled off to reveal what stinks of Microsoft lobbying

MR. Florian Müller is a target because he pretended to be pro-FOSS while he was campaigning against FOSS. This has “ACT” written all over it and, for those who do not know, ACT is a confirmed Microsoft front group. Secrecy is suspicious if not sinister when basic questions — such as the ones Müller is frequently asked — cannot be answered. Not even a yes/no question can be answered. He has many things about him which suggest that he is still lobbying (as a campaigner for hire as he would probably prefer to call it), just as he has done in his latest jobs. This is not an ordinary case of legitimate advocacy of Microsoft agenda; we are soon going to expose some recently-unmasked Microsoft activists whose role at Microsoft includes harassing bloggers, cursing Linux, promoting Microsoft, and insulting Microsoft critics, with preliminary details in the latest episode of TechBytes.

“Twitter finds FOSSpatents similar to MicrosoftPresse,” writes Groklaw. “‘Nuff said. Wait. What’s the definition of a FOSS patent, by the way?” See the screenshot at the top. It comes from the FFII, which Müller has been attacking again recently. The FFII has been very, very naughty because it stands in Microsoft’s way and antagonises software patents. Müller has been trying to incite some members of the FFII against others, which is a dirty old divide-and-conquer tactic whose intended consequence is civil wars.

Richard Jones from Gartner claims that CPTN patents do not affect UNIX/Linux, but he is wrong (Gartner is wrong a lot of the time and we documented several examples of this). “He says that Novell never got any UNIX patents,” explains Pamela Jones over at Groklaw, “But they did. You can find the list of patents “related to the business” in the Attachments here to the APA between Novell and Santa Cruz. Novell, after all, got everything from USL, lock, stock and barrel.”

“To the media, a suggestion: ask Mueller who pays him currently. See if you get a straight answer. If not, ask him if he works for Microsoft. I have. Others have. He wouldn’t say.” –Pamela Jones, GroklawIn order to defend against this, Groklaw recently suggested that everyone joins the OIN (even free of charge) within weeks. Shortly afterwards there was a lot of OIN news [1, 2, 3] and in relation to KDE's announcement about joining the OIN Pamela Jones wrote: “It may be puzzling to those who imbibed Florian Mueller’s anti-OIN FUD or who don’t know exactly all that OIN does [Microsoft Florian is mass-mailing journalists to plant his disinformation through them]. What they get is explained here. You get more than licenses to OIN-owned patents. You get licenses in perpetuity to all member’s/licensee’s patents that relate to Linux, including the 882 patents Novell is planning to sell to the Microsoft consortium, made up of Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and EMC. So in case, in some alternate universe, the idea behind the sale was to give those dudes some patent infringement possibilities as a patent troll entity, the plan has been foiled for those who join OIN prior to the closing of the sale, which ought to inform us that OIN is not helpless against patent trolls. To the media, a suggestion: ask Mueller who pays him currently. See if you get a straight answer. If not, ask him if he works for Microsoft. I have. Others have. He wouldn’t say. That reminds me: when he and others in the TurboHercules group claimed that Microsoft had no connection to TurboHercules, did that turn out to be true? Live and learn, y’all.”

TurboHercules is partly owned by Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures is like a spinoff of Microsoft created by a Microsoft man with investment from Microsoft. John White, a patent attorney, criticises Intellectual Ventures very strongly, so even those who litigate with patents treat this whole trolling scam as an embarrassment and a danger to their occupation. █

“Prior art is as effective as US soldiers in Iraq: They control the ground they stand on, and nothing more. I used to say Vietnam, but, well, you know…”

Summary: Google harbours Wikileaks where Apple indiscriminately decides that anything from Wikileaks is not acceptable and thus bans the application

Linux has become popular in part owing to the accompanying philosophy it inherits from GNU. If this was not a factor to be taken into account by users, then it sure did make a difference to many developers. Google shares some of Torvalds’ philosophies when it comes to software development (freedom demoted in favour of technical merit) and Torvalds has an Android phone. There is nothing too wrong with that. A few weeks/months ago Steve Jobs smeared Android by suggesting that Android was not really open and Jobs received a lot of backlash for this unject insinuation. The head of Android compared Jobs to North Korea's dead leader (Kim Il-sung). As we showed earlier today in this post about Apple's Wikileaks censorship, Jobs is an abusive individual whose company regularly abuses power even to censor political dissent. Examples of this go even years back, e.g. software with humourous critique of George Bush.

Apple Inc has joined a growing number of U.S. companies that have severed ties with WikiLeaks, removing an application from its online store that gave users access to the controversial website’s content.

But Google Inc, which operates the second-largest online mobile applications store, has kept more than half a dozen apps available on its Android Marketplace that make it easier to access the confidential U.S. government documents WikiLeaks had released on its site.

It was very recently that Google said in its Android blog that rooting of one’s phone is acceptable and even encouraged as an option. There’s nothing to dislike about that. Apple is the opposite.

Apple hasn’t always been entirely transparent about its app approval procedures. It has admitted that there have been some slight snafus. However, the company’s explanation for this app’s removal seemed quite clear (which doesn’t necessarily mean it is, to some minds, justified).

“We removed the Manhattan Declaration app from the App Store because it violates our developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people,” an Apple spokesperson told CNET.

Over at Groklaw, Pamela Jones who has been defensive of Apple for a long time, writes: “So, here’s a question. Since minority views are what the First Amendment protects, if most of the world ends up on smart phones instead of computers, if the ruler’s edge is whether large groups get upset, how will they ever speak? This is getting serious.”

Techrights commends Groklaw for no longer posting items that defend Apple (it was different earlier this year) and it commends Google for showing that despite great success with Android it remains committed to at least some level of freedom. It would have been worse if the proprietary-but-Linux-based WebOS, for example, gained momentum like Google did. We are eager to see what MeeGo brings despite its management being on the iffy side. █

Audiocasts/Shows

Applications

According to tech blog GigaOM, the team behind the popular media player VLC will release a VLC Android app in “a matter of weeks”. This follows from the release of a dedicated VLC iPad app in September of this year, with iPhone support arriving in October.

Today was a long, long day; due to some security issues with pcsc-lite, ccid and opensc, I had to kink out a few more issues with pcsc-lite, not only because I had to workaround upstream’s decisions that focused on fixing the issues with binary distributions (read: Debian), but also because the previous stable was 1.6.1, and the micro release after that (1.6.2) broke API enough to require patching a few reverse dependencies to work out properly.

Wine

There’s a new –optin commandline option that will tells winetricks to phone home after each run with info about which verbs really get used. Please consider using this, it will help future winetricks development. (You only have to give that option once, it sticks. You can turn it off with the –optout option, or by removing ~/.cache/winetricks.)

Games

The Humble Indie Bundle #2 is now over. Thanks everyone for your overwhelming support! The bundle has broken all of our expectations once again: the total payments exceeded $1.8 million! We should have more detailed statistics soon.

Desktop Environments

It is not uncommon to find dialogs which contains tabs, which themselves contain groups, which contain other groups. That’s quite a lot of borders… Not only does it look crowded, it also eats valuable content space. There are a few easy tricks you can use to avoid this issue.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

Today, a major change to the oxygen code was committed to SVN, so that the style now derives from QCommonStyle as opposed to KStyle in the past. This is the first (and most difficult) step towards writing a fork of the oxygen widget style that would depend on Qt only, and not on KDE, so that one could, for instance, use oxygen natively on Windows (TM) for all Qt applications. Additionally, this change also results in better performances in painting widgets, and a more maintainable code.

I don’t normally comment on other people’s software… but… a little while ago, opensuse was wondering whether KDE apps would work with these Gnome Shell requirements. Last time I checked, their “Activities” sounded like virtual desktops, but now they’ve returned to an application-based shell. This in sharp contrast to Plasma Desktop’s increasingly Activity-oriented workspace.

You haven’t seen it listed above, but it would feature under the glorious title of best all-arounder. And that would have to be Linux Mint. While it did underperform in the spring, the autumn release is just splendid. It’s a perfect 10 for the tenth release.

[...]

I’ve missed many names, I know. For example, Debian or Sabayon. They are also very worthy contenders. But you can’t have them all. Ultimately, it comes down to a few choice selections.

Year 2010 has been very cool when it comes to Linux. Tons of great stuff, a torrent of disappointments, lots of in-fighting and forking. In this raging sea of storm and change, you will find a number of excellent distributions that should make a significant impact on how you use and enjoy the computer.

Perhaps Ubuntu looks the best, perhaps openSUSE is the reliable workhorse, perhaps Pardus is most user friendly, perhaps nothing beats Puppy when it comes to using your distro anywhere you go. But at the end of the day, when you combine everything into one equation, there’s no doubt about the winner. It’s Linux Mint.

Red Hat Family

Evolven Software, Inc., the pioneer of Granular Configuration Automation solutions, today announced their support for Linux Red Hat. Evolven will enable customers to achieve greater visibility into the granular configuration information of Red Hat’s application infrastructure which can affect the availability and performance of IT environments where Red Hat is running.

Linux distributions tend to fall into one of two camps. The first are those, like Ubuntu and Fedora, that are aimed mostly at enthusiasts and others happy to teeter on the bleeding edge of technology. The other group consists of more stable, commercially supported software, designed for those after less excitement, and includes products such as SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). New releases are a rarity in this category, so when a major new product like RHEL 6 comes along it’s a big event, and one worthy of close attention.

Flavours and Variants

Ubuntu Studio has been updated and is now based on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). Ubuntu Studio is tailored to meet the requirements of creative applications that involve audio, video, or graphics processing. It makes it easy for new users to get up to speed on GNU/Linux multi-media software, and makes less well-known applications readily available. This version has been pre-loaded with various multimedia software packages, such as Gimp, Cinepaint, Ardour, Blender, and JACK-Daemon.

Phones

But beyond big, established app retailers like Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market, will these rivals be able to find developers willing to custom tailor software for their systems? And will enough consumers bother thumbing through their catalogs?

Nokia/MeeGo

Trinity Audio Group is now selling a MeeGo Linux-based tablet bundled with version 5.0 of its Transmission audio platform for musicians. The $700 Indamixx 2 offers a 10.1-inch touchscreen, a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 2GB of RAM and 260GB of storage, plus the Renoise tracking and sampling application, according to the company.

Trinity Audio Group and creative director Ronald Stewart have pushed the idea of a mobile music tablet since around 2005. I first saw what they were working on in the summer of 2006, as they readied a dedicated mobile DAW. But, at least from my vantage point, it’s really taken until now for some of the available hardware and software to evolve to the point that it could deliver on what they wanted to do. Products based first on Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) platforms and netbooks, while usable and more mobile than a laptop, required various tradeoffs. Linux software provided some significant power, but wasn’t yet an optimized experience for mobile use. I noted some of the promise, and shortcomings, in a review in late 2008 for Keyboard of Indamixx’s original Samsung hardware. (Keep in mind, this is all before anyone had heard of the iPad.)

The Archos 5 Internet Tablet runs Google Android, has a 5 inch, 800 x 480 pixel display and an 800MHz ARM-based processor. Out of the box it can handle a wide range of audio and video formats, and with a little work, you can even install the Google Android Market on it. But the Archos 5 is stuck with Android 1.6 for now, and it’s not clear of Archos will ever update the software to let you run newer versions of the operating system since the company is now pushing a new line of “generation 8″ tablets running Android 2.2.

Android

A PlayStation app is coming to the iPhone “very soon”, Sony has announced.

The Official PlayStation App will let you check out your PlayStation Network trophies and keep tabs on your friends’ games and online status. There’ll be a news feed too and you’ll be able to view the PlayStation Blog.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

I have been experiencing problems with Firefox’s built-in session restore which was configured to load the tabs from the last browsing session automatically on the next startup to allow me to continue working exactly where I stopped the last time.

It is a valid question. Iceweasel/Firefox is fantastic software, but when compared to some of the newer WebKit based browsers, it begins to look somewhat stale. This lack of freshness is often compounded on Debian systems where the Iceweasel packages can lag some way behind Mozilla’s official Firefox releases.

Databases

Here at Recorded Future we use Ubuntu (running on Amazon EC2), but so far we have not explored Ubuntu Upstart that much. During the holidays I made an effort to get acquainted with Upstart and to implement proper MySQL start and stop with it.

CMS

An RC comes after the beta period and before final release. That means we think we’re done. We currently have no known issues or bugs to squash. But with tens of millions of users, a variety of configurations, and thousands of plugins, it’s possible we’ve missed something. So if you haven’t tested WordPress 3.1 yet, now is the time! Please though, not on your live site unless you’re extra adventurous.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

“We would like to see the European Commission back up its public rhetoric regarding free software, open standards and interoperability with its own actions,” it said. “This would require DIGIT to rethink some procurement practices in order to open up public software procurement to competition.”

Openness/Sharing

Hackulous, the community dedicated to the cracking of Apple DRM and the indexing of unprotected software for iPhone, iPod and iPad, has announced some interesting innovations. As well as having cracking software for the yet-to-be-released Mac App Store already up their sleeve, they also have an intriguing “reverse BitTorrent” system for jailbroken devices which will increase cracked app availability on the Internet.

You see, in trying everything—audiobooks, POD, limited editions—I’ve discovered the thing that captures the public’s interest is also the thing that makes the most money is also the thing that has the least logistics: super-premium limited editions. Over and over again, when I describe With a Little Help to people, they fixate on the limited editions. I’ve had dozens of e-mails from people practically begging to buy the $275 editions I’m doing—and I stand to make $50,000 or more from them.

Programming

Every so often Lance tweets about some science policy report. My natural tendency, like any good techie, is to keep my distance from such reports. I do recognize that they serve an important social function (like dentists or lawyers) but personally I would want to have as little as possible to do with them.

Standards/Consortia

For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free and open standard according to this definition. Here is a short writeup of what I have been able to gather so far. I brought up the topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list in July 2009, for those that want to see some background information. According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.

Microsoft has unveiled an online sandbox where developers can experiment with unfinished web standards you won’t find in its Internet Explorer browser.

After years of cold shouldering the web standards movement, Redmond has taken a very different approach with Internet Explorer 9, now available in beta. And with the introduction of its new sandbox, the company hopes to convince you that its promotion of web standards is more prudent than the approach favored by its rivals.

NEXT MONTH many European Union members may be regretting their system of a rotating presidency. That’s because the gavel will be handed to Hungary, whose populist and power-hungry government has just adopted a media law more suited to an authoritarian regime than to a Western democracy.

The right-wing Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban won 53 percent of the popular vote in an election this year but gained 66 percent of the seats in parliament – enough to change the constitution. It proceeded to take over or attack the authority of every institution it did not control, including the presidency, the Supreme Court and the state audit office; the central bank is now under its assault.

Parents, the next time you fret that your child is wasting too much time playing video games, consider new research suggesting that video gaming may have real-world benefits for your child’s developing brain.

Daphne Bavelier is professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. She studies young people playing action video games. Having now conducted more than 20 studies on the topic, Bavelier says, “It turns out that action video games are far from mindless.”

That’s because the twin brothers have asked for a remarkable series of “do-overs” since signing the settlement agreement in February 2008, surrounded by their lawyers. First, they complained that the settlement wasn’t fair, because they were duped into believing that the Facebook stock was worth more than it actually was. Then, they got into a battle with the lawyers who won the settlement for them, from the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Hedges, alleging the firm had engaged in malpractice. (That dispute ended up in arbitration, which was resolved in September, with the Quinn Emanuel firm collecting the full fee it asked for, reportedly $13 million.)

Last year, he might have just dropped the $184.85 Garmin global positioning system into his cart. This time, he took out his Android phone and typed the model number into an app that instantly compared the Best Buy price to those of other retailers. He found that he could get the same item on Amazon.com Inc.’s website for only $106.75, no shipping, no tax.

Despite Vice President Biden’s recent squabbling with Republican senators over the meaning of Christmas, he and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell do agree on something. They both say WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has published thousands of confidential Pentagon and State Department documents on his group’s website, is “a high-tech terrorist.”

But assuming that President Obama is not ready to drop a bomb on Assange, punishing him for disseminating military records and diplomatic cables will require specifying what crime he committed under U.S. law. That won’t be easy, unless the Justice Department is prepared to criminalize something journalists do every day: divulge information that the government wants to keep secret.

When bad weather forced a London-bound Virgin flight to reroute from Heathrow Airport to Stansted, passengers had to wait three hours on the tarmac before they could disembark. A select group did, however, get to leave the plane after about an hour. No, they weren’t disabled, sick or parents with small, noisy children. The group making an early exit consisted of once-popular singer Madonna and her entourage of about 15 people.

I couldn’t quite believe that, as that Florida Times-Union editorial I linked to earlier suggests, Rep. Corrine Brown had threatened a libel suit against a newspaper columnist for the sort of criticism most politicians face.

How high are international data roaming rates? I have direct evidence from two providers: an Italian provider TIM charges about $10 per megabyte; a U.S. provider T-mobile charges $15 per megabyte. The typical business user uses receives about 15 megabytes per day of email. My smartphone uses about four times this. By way of contrast, you can buy a SIM from Vodafone UK with 30 megabytes of data for about $30. Wifi at the airport or a hotel runs about $10-$60 per day. Over-the-air prices charged to local customers is much lower: TIM charges $25 per month for 5 gigabytes of data, of which probably about 2 gigs is actually used, so the effective rate is about $0.0125 per megabyte. T-mobile in the US charges a similar amount for similar service.,

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) [advocacy websites] on Friday dropped a lawsuit [notice of dismissal, PDF] challenging the US government’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) licensing scheme after the government changed the policy. The groups announced in August that they would pursue a legal challenge [JURIST report] to the scheme despite being issued a license to represent Anwar al-Awlaqi [NYT profile; JURIST news archive], a US citizen who was labeled an SDGT in July.

In Reason magazine, Radley Balko takes an in-depth look at all the places in the USA where it’s nominally illegal to record the police, and all the people who’ve faced fines or prison for recording law enforcement officers breaking the law with illegal beatings and harassment.

Last week, the Senate refused to approve the DREAM Act, a bill that would have offered a path to citizenship for children brought into the country illegally if they attend college or serve in the military. Opponents stated that no immigration reform will happen without first “securing” the 1,951 mile U.S. border with Mexico. America’s current approach to border security is wasteful and ineffective, and “securing the border” will never be achieved until we redefine our approach to, and definition of, border security. With many in Washington expressing concern about fiscal responsibility, reigning in the billions wasted annually on current border security policies should really be a priority. But America’s xenophobic preoccupation with an “invasion” by brown-skinned “illegals” may keep us pursuing an expensive and unreasonable approach to border security.

Chiquita’s most famous act of interference with Central American politics is its role in toppling Guatemala’s left-leaning government in 1954. For the first half of the 20th century, Chiquita poured investment capital into Guatemala, buying the country’s productive land and controlling shares in its railroad, electric utility, and telegraph industries; as a result, the Guatemalan government was subservient to Chiquita’s interests, exempting the company from internal taxation and guaranteeing workers earned no more than fifty cents per day. At the time of the 1944 Guatemalan revolution, Chiquita was the country’s number one landowner, employer, and exporter.

In 1950, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was elected with 65% of the vote, and Chiquita perceived his agrarian land reforms as a threat to their corporate interests. Chiquita, with the help of the father of modern public relations, Edward L. Bernays, waged a propaganda war and managed to convince the American public and politicians that Arbenz was secretly a dangerous communist who could not be allowed to remain in power. With McCarthy-era hysteria in full swing, President Eisenhower secretly ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow the democratically elected Arbenz in a 1954 covert operation.

Cablegate

Probably the first and if carefully watched, most visible issue will be the legislation.

After the national security fiasco that resulted in Cablegate most governments around the globe (with the US at its front) will be hard-pressed to “do something about it”. Because neither police, nor court, nor governement can (or rather should) operate against the law and current law does not direcly criminalise WikiLeaks, they will have to change the law.

“Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism. I fell into a hornets’ nest of revolutionary feminism’’, he alleged. The lawyer of the two women who have accused Mr Assange of sexual misconduct hit back saying that he was spreading “false rumours’’ to smear his clients. He denied allegations made by Mr Assange’s legal team that they were CIA “pawns’’ and pointed out that, on the contrary, they were “supporters of WikiLeaks’’.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Bolivia may have been the only country to speak out against these failures, but several negotiators told us privately that they support us. Anyone who has seen the science on climate change knows that the Cancún agreement was irresponsible.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., weighing 2010 pay packages for a year that could rank as Wall Street’s second best, said it may grant bonuses that depend on future earnings, in addition to stock performance.

I’m convinced that the best way to track the mood of Stanford University is to keep an eye on your News Feed. And there’s one thing in particular that keeps popping up on mine- a prestigious program for which dozens of my friends have applied, and to which a lucky few have been accepted. I’m talking, of course, about Teach for America, the educational service corps that places fresh-faced graduates in troubled urban and rural classrooms across the U.S. The program’s rise has been meteoric: it currently boasts 8,200 corps members and claims to have reached 3 million students since it was founded in 1990. Its popularity at Stanford is no mere trick of my News Feed. The Daily recently reported that TFA and similar organizations “have witnessed a surge in applications from Stanford” in recent years.

But a bank’s ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country. With it has gone an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll revealed that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005.

Steven Antin’s new movie, Burlesque (PG-13), features about twenty different brands of products, including gratuitous use of R.J. Reynolds’ Camel cigarettes. Other films that have showcased cigarettes this year include the Disney film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (rated PG, which features Newport cigarettes), and For Colored Girls (rated R, by Lionsgate, which features Marlboros).

Media Matters uncovered another internal email sent out by Fox News’ Washington, D.C. Managing Editor Bill Sammon which ordered Fox Network journalists to slant coverage of the climate change issue by “refrain[ing] from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” The memo is inflammatory because the increase in global annual average temperatures over the last 50 years is a well-established fact.

The editorial was prompted by the leak of an internal Fox News memo ordering its “reporters” to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” The memo was sent by Bill Sammon, Fox News’ Washington managing editor, in 2009 and released by Media Matters last week.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

Government plans to block internet pornography at source, amid concerns about the “premature sexualisation” of children, have prompted a fierce backlash from digital rights campaigners. The proposals have also highlighted how the debate around children and sexual material is increasingly shaped by religious conservatives.

One of the organisations quoted extensively over the last few days is Safermedia, a pressure group campaigning to “reduce the harmful effects of the media on our children, families and society”.

Safermedia, formerly known as Mediamarch, supports the “porn lock” proposals and its spokespeople claim academic research substantiates their view that sexual imagery harms children’s mental health. But their moral stance is an explicitly Christian one – the group’s co-founder Miranda Suit is an organiser for the Christian People’s Alliance, and its website cites Saint Paul’s epistles to the Philippians and the Ephesians as inspiration for the campaign.

Another day and even more evidence that Homeland Security’s decision to have its Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group seize a bunch of domain names without any warning or adversarial hearing was a colossal screw up. We haven’t heard too much about the sites seized concerning trademark infringement, but there were five that were the focus of copyright infringement — including a bunch of hiphop blogs (which were regularly used by artists and record labels alike to promote their songs) and a search engine. Last week, we went through a partial affidavit from a newly minted ICE agent named Andrew Reynolds, which showed numerous technological and legal errors in explaining why the domain of the search engine, Torrent Finder, was seized. Yesterday, we wrote about how some of the “evidence” used against the blogs included songs sent by the labels for promotional purposes.

A federal judge on Tuesday awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted their counsel $2.5 million for the costs litigating the case for more than four years.

“This is beyond opinion … beyond commentary. He wanted to threaten and intimidate these judges” by trying to incite an audience made up of dangerous extremists, she said. The judges testified they feared for their lives, she said.

Turner maintained the posting was nothing more than protected political speech.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

On Tuesday FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski gave AT&T a decision that was gift-wrapped for the holiday season. By a 3-to-2 vote, the FCC passed a rule that, in the chairman’s words, “protects Internet freedom.”

If only that were true.

After a year of promises to deliver on President Obama’s pledge to protect Net Neutrality, this chairman has pushed through a rule that favors the very industry his FCC is supposed to regulate, leaving Internet users with few protections and putting the future of the open Internet in peril.

Look for shortly to appear what I’m calling the Trojan App, a hybrid mobile application that doesn’t exist yet but certainly will within hours or days of the new rules going into effect. The Trojan App is a legitimate mobile application that performs multiple functions, at least one of which is to circumvent the new wireless rules.

Here’s what I mean. Maybe you saw the story a couple of days ago about technology being brought to market that would enable mobile phone companies to charge Facebook users by the page for access. Under the new rules a mobile carrier can do that, no problem. But because that mobile network offers its own voice service (they all do) under the new rules they can’t similarly restrict Skype or Google Voice or any of the dozens or hundreds of Voice-over-IP third-party services out there. So what’s to keep Skype or Google or Yahoo or iChat or MrVoIP from offering a mobile version of its service that includes a free gateway to Facebook?

Nothing.

These are perfectly legitimate applications that are protected from throttling by virtue of their competing with a core service of the ISP, yet in this instance they will have gained a secondary function of acting as a Virtual Private Network link to an otherwise-regulated service like Facebook.

The New York Times lead editorial today is entitled China and Intellectual Property link here. It is a familiar litany of complaints about their theft of U S “property” with no suggestion that there might be another side to the question.

If we were in China’s position, still poor and backward in so many areas, we too would try our hardest to skate around the obstacles to using the latest innovations. Innovation is the key to rapid development and national material progress. We ourselves have violated the IP of other countries when we were behind and trying to develop. Of course, that was before we had fully developed the mythology of IP as “property” and that copying without paying was robbery.

[...]

The present IP system in the US is marred by its harmful and excessively long term, by its grossly ambiguous and generous definition of what constitutes innovation, by the capture of the system by big business which dearly loves its monopolies, and by a legal system that grows fat on litigation.

The copyright-infringement allegations are part of Perfect 10’s ongoing lawsuit against Google, a suit with a tortured procedural history. In 2007, a federal appeals court rendered a far-reaching decision, saying search engines like Google were not infringing copyrights by displaying thumbnails and hyperlinking to Perfect 10’s perfect babes.

BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is fighting the permanent injunction issued by the District Court of California last summer in their case against the MPAA. isoHunt contests the imposition of a site-wide keyword filter based on a list of movie industry keywords. By doing so, the search engine also makes a case for the public’s ‘freedom of search’, not just on BitTorrent, but on the Internet in general.

Righthaven, the Las Vegas copyright troll formed this spring, has moved beyond lawsuits over newspaper articles and begun targeting websites for the unauthorized reposting of images. First up, more than a dozen infringement lawsuits concerning the so-called Vdara “death ray.”

Summary: How Microsoft is daemonising ordinary people and confusing lawmakers using terminology and imposters who pretend to speak for free/open source software

MOVING to Free (libre) software is a decision which ought to be motivated at least in part by the realisation that freedom is hard to earn and it is very valuable. It’s only when it’s lost that its value can be appreciated. Microsoft pretends to be countering counterfeiting while in fact it uses counterfeiting to counter freedom, ensuring that populations especially in poor countries have no control over their computing; instead, Microsoft takes control. Glyn Moody has found this post from China about a new and dishonest Microsoft campaign:

One of the biggest issues Western firms have with China is the country’s stance on intellectual property rights. Despite the Chinese Government stepping up its efforts to battle the issue in recent years, the problems still exist.

Whether it be the stalls in Beijing’s Silk Market selling their staggering range of counterfeit designer goods, Chinese media broadcasters using copyright footage without permission, or the ever impressive copycat products (known in China as ‘山寨’ – Shānzhài) such as the recent ‘iPed’ — the fake iPad, there is no doubt about it intellectual property infringements are rife in the PRC.

[...]

For instance in 2008, Microsoft rolled out a program called “Windows Genuine Advantage” which caused “black screens of death” to appear every hour on unregistered versions of the Windows operating system. The only way to resolve the problem would have been to buy a genuine copy of Windows.

Bill Gates in China 1995

Yet, just a year earlier, Bill Gates stated that he liked the Chinese pirating his software over its competitors, because he believed that eventually Chinese consumers would pay for the real thing.

Wikileaks recently taught us something new about the “black screens of death”. To the government, it’s about control (being able to suspend computers in a hostile nation), not about so-called ‘piracy’ (counterfeiting). Be careful of the Microsoft spin, which seems to be everywhere these days.

In a “Guest Post” from Microsoft’s Walli [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (who pretends not to understand Free software, e.g. by implicitly comparing it to communism) Microsoft’s Outercurve Foundation gets promoted while Outercurve/Microsoft staff continues to redefine open source. It is infiltrating its competition and obscures freedom as in “free to distribute”, as opposed to free of charge. Not so long ago the same type of people tried to tell us that RAND was compatible with Free software and they managed to derail the second version of EIF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], which more and more groups are not pleased with. The FFII deciphers this message from Dutch:

IT journalist Brenno de Winter is not impressed by the #EIF

That’s what will happen if Microsoft is allowed to hijack “open source” and then use mobbyists/lobbyists to lie about what it is. Glyn Moody predicted this would happen when he wrote about it for Linux Journal around 3 years ago. █

“There’s free software [gratis, dumpware] and then there’s open source… there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.”

National heroes or national felons with PR facelift?(Photo by Joi Ito from Inbamura, Japan)

Summary: How powerful people with excessive wealth ensure the population beneath them remains ignorant and obedient, using control of information (media acquisition and censorship)

COMPANIES like PayPal, MasterCard and Visa are known to be defending their government’s bad behaviour. It was all over the news this month. Amazon arguably falls under the same category, but guess who else? “Apple removes Wikileaks app? North Korea are more open than Apple,” wrote Gordon Sinclair regarding this very recent news. Yes, Apple censored Wikileaks without specifying a reason, but there are excuses. TechDirt is not typically hostile towards Apple but its latest headline says: “Apple The Latest To Convict Wikileaks Despite No Charges Or Trial; Kills Wikileaks App For Violating Unnamed Laws”

The thing is, Wikileaks hasn’t even been charged with a crime yet, let alone found guilty of one, so it’s not clear why all these companies claim that the app does not comply with he law. Also, while we’re still waiting for evidence of anyone actually put in “harm’s way” due to Wikileaks, that reasoning doesn’t make any sense either. The information found on Wikileaks is being written about in all sorts of major news publications — so if a Wikileaks app is putting people in harm’s way, then so is the Safari browser on the iPhone that can be used to access all the same information.

But, an even bigger point is buried towards the end in an update, where Greenwald asks:

Why aren’t Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, their web hosting company and various banks terminating their relationships with The New York Times, the way they all did with WikiLeaks: not only for the NYT’s publication of many of the same diplomatic and war cables published by WikiLeaks, but also for this much more serious leak today in which WikiLeaks was completely uninvolved?

And, I think, we can add Apple to that list. After all, if these companies keep claiming that Wikileaks “broke the law” (as most of the companies listed here are saying), why do they not feel the same way about the NY Times?

Let this teach us an important lesson. Supporting Apple is supporting a vision where people have no perceived individuality/superiority (everyone uses Apple) and everyone is digitally ‘jailed’. That’s the type of vision tyrants tend to have and speaking of tyrants, watch out for Bill Gates’ hijack of the press, which in turn he uses to promote his power ploy (taking over schools, libraries, and so on). One journalist has just published an article titled “The Gates Foundation conspiracy to take over the media” (similar to the idea of suppressing Wikileaks’ content):

Bill Gates is too shrewd a businessman to want to actually take over a money-losing, failing industry like the media. (Though newspapers today do have something in common with software; one person produces the original product and then millions obtain copies of it for free.)

No, what I want to talk about is the Gates Foundation’s funding of media. I’ve already written plenty about this … maybe too much.

More accurately, I wanted to talk with the media folks at the Seattle philanthropy about their perspective on “partnering” with the media.

These kind of arrangements confuse or disturb some people and I’ve given the media folks at the Gates Foundation a bit of grief over the past few months about the nature of some of these partnerships. This might seem kind of odd, I know, since I work for NPR, which also has been funded by the world’s largest philanthropy to report on global health and development issues — and which is what I do (even though I get no Gates money).